The biggest bet isn’t on sports – it’s on Sydney Sweeney

There are plenty of ways to sell sports.

You can show an athlete celebrating a championship. You can show the emotion, intensity and physicality that makes sports worth watching in the first place.

Or you can put Sydney Sweeney naked on a pool table.

Sports betting company Novig chose the latter.

In the newest attempt at promoting the brand in a national campaign, Sweeney moves through a series of sports – football, basketball, soccer, baseball, hockey – with sports equipment strategically covering her otherwise bare body.

At one point, she delivers the campaign’s punchline: “You can’t trade this, I just look good here.”

Watch the Novig campaign commercial via X.

It is provocative. It is memorable. It is also easy to ignore what the commercial is supposed to be selling. Because for a company built around sports predictions, the sports feel secondary.

The product is Sydney Sweeney.

And this is where this advertisement becomes more than another provocative celebrity commercial. 

Sweeney isn’t just the celebrity hired to read the script and collect the check. She joined Novig as a strategic partner and equity holder, meaning she has a financial stake in the company she is helping promote.

Now, when Sweeney tells viewers that she “looks good” surrounded by recognizable sporting equipment, she’s not just selling an image. She’s helping sell a platform that wants people to put money behind their predictions.

And the timing couldn’t be more riveting.

Sports betting is already deeply rooted in young adult culture, now more than ever before. 

In a 2023 study, the NCAA found that 58% of 18-to-22-year-olds surveyed had participated in at least one sports betting activity. Among college students who live on campus, that number jumps almost 10%, to 67%. 

As a college student myself, I don’t need a survey to tell me how visible sports betting has become.

It’s everywhere. Almost inescapable.

College is often the first time young adults experience a certain level of independence – nobody standing over their shoulder telling them what they can or cannot spend. That freedom can make betting feel less like gambling and more like another part of being a sports fan.

Which is troublesome. But this is exactly why advertising matters. Novig’s commercial doesn’t make sports betting look risky.

It makes it look cool.

It makes it feel “fun.”

It makes it sexy.

Advertising professor Heather Randolph at Bradley University said Novig’s strategy is nothing new. 

Sports betting has historically targeted a predominantly male audience, and advertisers have often relied on sex appeal to grab that audience’s attention.

“We’re gonna use a really sexy female to attract our male buyers,” Randolph said, describing the strategy she believes Novig employed with Sweeney.

In other words, sex sells. And Novig knows it.

Betting ethics aside, this campaign gets more complicated because of its concerning implications for women and feminism.

Sweeney isn’t wrong for embracing her sexuality. She doesn’t owe anyone modesty, and there is nothing inherently anti-feminist about a woman deciding to be provocative.

But feminism isn’t only about giving women the freedom to make choices. It’s also about questioning the systems that benefit from those choices. 

And that’s where Sweeney’s role in this campaign becomes uncomfortable.

For decades, feminism has challenged the idea that a woman’s value should be determined primarily by her appearance. Yet advertising in society continues to find new ways to make appearance the centerpiece of a woman’s value.

Novig’s campaign does exactly that.

Instead of asking viewers to care about the strategy behind sports prediction, the commercial tells them to look at Sweeney.

Instead of making the product itself the most memorable part of the advertisement, Novig makes her body the center of attention. We don’t even get a glimpse at what Novig really is. All we hear is that it’s “just sports.”

There is a difference between a woman having control over her body and a corporation profiting from turning that confidence into a marketing strategy; the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Sara Erlichman, a professor of communication and public relations at Bradley University, said the campaign creates another problem from a public relations perspective – it can appeal to one audience while pushing another away.

“The strategy and the creativity that went into reaching this audience, in fact, alienates a whole other audience, which happens to make up 50% of the population,” she said.

That criticism becomes even more relevant when looking at the women who have pushed back against the campaign.

Female athletes responded, arguing the commercial sexualizes women in a sports context while overlooking athleticism, discipline and physical work that women actually bring to sports. Olympic athletes Ariana Titmus and Amy Hunt are among those who have criticized the campaign. 

Amy Hunts’ response to Sydney Sweeney’s Novig ad includes Hunt stating, “Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sports look like,” referring to her race in an interview.

And I understand why they’re angry.

Women in sports have spent decades trying to convince audiences to see them as athletes, not objects. Then Novig enters the fray and essentially says: “Look at Sydney Sweeney.” An actress – not an athlete – offering up beauty rather than strength. 

Sweeney’s advertising history hasn’t helped the ad’s reception.

Last year, American Eagle’s “Sydney Has Great Jeans” campaign became another major investor in her image. The campaign played on “jeans” and “genes,” including a version of the commercial where Sweeney discussed traits such as hair and eye color.

The products are different, and so is the controversy, but Sweeney remains the selling point. Novig just capitalized on that: make Sweeney’s appearance impossible to ignore and slide the product in somewhere.

She didn’t even need to be an athlete to sell the product. She just needed to be Sydney Sweeney.

That’s the gamble Novig made.

And it succeeded – if the goal was getting people to talk about Sydney Sweeney. But that’s not what Novig is supposed to be selling.

It’s supposed to be selling sports, remember?

“It didn’t become about their product anymore,” Randolph said. “It became about her.” 

When the celebrity becomes more memorable than the product – and that celebrity owns part of the product – maybe the biggest bet Novig made wasn’t on sports at all.

It was on us.